A grand feast table reminiscent of Dutch still life paintings. As you walk down it, there’s moss and bugs. A mini kitchen that shows the invisible labor of food preparation and production, with photos from Gustavus’s past. A circle of hand-carved spoons.
The student-curated exhibit Farm to Frame traces sweet and unsavory connections between food, labor, culture, craft, and community. Visitors to the exhibit explore the often invisible processes of food production and preparation through a Cup’ik fishing basket or a Swedish hand-crank coffee mill. There are more than 100 objects spanning five continents, from hand-carved utensils to still life paintings.
“Food and food preparation is undervalued,” says recent grad Audrey Power Theisen ’25, now Gustavus Art Preparator and Exhibitions Manager. Parallels could be made between food and the arts with respect to value, and with respect to multimodal thinking. “The arts are so important, so interdisciplinary, and so practical,” Power Theisen says.
For instance, in the process of making this exhibit, she and her fellow Gusties built mounts and bookshelves with power tools, combed through archives for intellectually and aesthetically interesting artworks, made connections across decades, disciplines, and continents, collaborated to solve creative challenges, “and learned how to make a vision come to life.”
Farm to Frame is on view through Dec. 19, 2025, 9 a.m. through 6 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. You can also view it online. Funding from the Object Lessons grant supporting object-based research on campus, and was made in partnership with Art History professor Colleen Stockman.
